"We had to do some custom dev on the World Machine. We requested some additional dev to Stephen Schmitt, author of the World Machine. He added an additional variable exposition to the tile rendering system in order to use with a dedicated render farm written in c#. We ended up piloting World Machine and threw a computation every 3 days across 80 computers."

"The road builder toolset is basically a customized pathfinding algorithm"

"...By running the road network through a terraforming tool"

"terraforming tool was able to run exclusively on our render farm"

Likely a blend of custom tools and COTS. And, like you said, if they had WM source licensing - they had a good starting point for doing something proprietary. BUT again, like you said, it'd be easier for some functions to be standalone tools rather than make a super-code in WM/Houdini.

Good thoughts there.

EDIT: If all tools are made in Houdini - I need to rethink some of my life choices

jayhem

The most frustrating thing is building 8k tiled maps without having GPU or render farm possibilities. It just takes days and sometimes (never understood why) the blending is wrong (bunch of white spots).